Bridge Maintenance
by CrossesWithHonor
Summary: Sequel to 'Bridge Building', set a little over one year later. Some forces on Earth want out of the League. Admiral Thenuwara watches over the creation of what's intended to be the first of the SLN's modern wall of battle. Rivendell has some new toys from their friends on Manticore and is building more. None of this makes the Mesan Alignment very happy.
1. Prologue, June, 1924 PD

This is a sequel to my previous story 'Bridge Building', and you really should read that first. As with that story, this story is in sync with canon up to _Mission of Honor_, lightly AU up to _Cauldron of Ghosts_, and almost certainly will diverge somewhat from future books. Events in this story start a bit over one year after the conclusion of both _Bridge Building_ and _Cauldron of Ghosts_. I'd guess at least one Honorverse novel will take place between the end of my previous story and the start of this one. The structure of the Sol System Government that unfolds as part of this story is entirely my own invention and has no basis in any of Weber's text.

The Honorverse belongs to David Weber. I'm just playing with it for a bit.

**Prologue: June 1924 PD**

_Sol System, Solarian League Navy Fleet Headquarters_

"So how fares your project?" Fleet Admiral Kingsford asked. He hadn't wanted to pull Thenuwara away from that project for the time it took to Sol and back, but he could hardly go out to Sanderson himself, and the SLN's newest five-star Admiral was one of the very few people he could count on to tell the truth to him.

"General Industries' people are just about ready to lay down the first hulls of their updated design. And they're projecting a build time of thirty months." By the standards of any SLN yard, that was a breakneck pace. "They've also prepared some paper studies that might be worth further development, if we have the budget for them."

"Will we be able to meet the Manties on anything like an even basis with them?"

"Perhaps with enough of them, but the more important fact is that someone with technological parity with the Manites could not hold them off with light units. The first proposal is one to basically convert a _Scientist_ or _Vega_ into an optimized missile pod carrier, and along the way update everything that's practical to update. It would cost almost as much as building a new SD(P) from scratch, and be even less capable than the Sanderson Navy's original design… but it could be done in 18 months, given the yard space to build it. The second is an SD(P) design that, like what we're laying down in the yards we captured from the Princedom, is based on their SD(P) design, but this one is intended to use as many components as possible from existing stores and/or dismantling the reserve fleet. Again, less capable, but they believe it can be built in 24 months instead of 30.

"On the other hand, what we're laying down now at Sanderson is considerably more capable than the PSN built; we're using the best hardware available in the League, whether or not the Navy used it previously, as well as quite a few R&D products from General Industries. All things being equal, the Princedom's design needed a 2:1 advantage over Rivendell's _Aes Sedai_ DN(P) for an even fight. We're projecting that the upgrades we can make – mostly in electronics – could cut that to 3:2. Of course, the elves have probably incorporated some Manticoran technology into the last two flights of _Aes Sedai_, and certainly have in all the new construction they're building – mostly for their alliance partners. And one of the changes GIT's people made was to try and design things to be upgraded, and in anticipation of eventually reverse-engineering Manticoran developments. GIT's people have also designed in bays for two enormous remote platforms because the Manticorans pod SDs do; the platforms we're currently proposing those spaces now are loaded with fire control and point defense but we think the Manty version enabled that FTL fire control system of theirs. Which we're nowhere near matching. We do have a hand-built, experimental system that fits in a LAC, but GIT says volume production is a long way off."

"So what you're telling me is you have some ideas for stop gaps that won't be good enough and would require us throwing money and people at to build enough to matter, and the best GIT can do right now won't be ready for another two and a half years at best and is still significantly inferior to what Manticore already has deployed. And you want to go ahead and build that anyway, and keep R&D and construction isolated out at Sanderson. Does that some things up?"

"Yes. I'm not sure of the merits of either of GIT's expedient class proposals, but I am convinced that it's time to start laying down our first hulls. And until we get to the bottom of this Mesan conspiracy of the Manties, I'm convinced we need to do our R&D and construction somewhere as far from prying eyes as possible. GIT is convinced the improved versions of the PSN's missiles they've come up with are already better than Technodyne's, and I'd prefer that they stay proprietary to the SLN."

[break]

_Sol System, Thenuwara family estate_

Admiral Thenuwara had avoided visiting the family compound on her last trip to Earth. She'd only been in-system long enough to report to Kingsford, and speak briefly with the people putting together the civilian experts that would be following her shortly. After passing through the tightest security screening any civilian in the SLN's employee had ever had. Finding good and loyal people who had to agree to none but highly censored communications outside the Sanderson system and to stay out there for five years, even if they would be able to bring their families with them and be very well compensated financially for the task, was difficult. But General Industries of Terra was a huge transstellar corporation; there were enough of them that fit the bill.

Speaking with her father was not something she was looking forward to. He was a hundred and fifteen years old, and had retired from the SLN as a Fleet Admiral when it became clear he would never get a clear shot at the Battle Fleet CO's job, or the overall command of the Navy that almost always followed. Three of the four before Rampajet had been from the Thenuwara family, and the other old fleet families had been concerned they were becoming too powerful. Choosing Rampajet instead of her father had still been a mistake, even if she likely would not have had a much freer rein with her father in the CNO's office.

"Thank you for coming." He said.

"Do I have you to thank for my fifth star?" She normally had more tact than that.

"I may have suggested that it looked bad for the only admiral in Battle Fleet who has won a battle recently to remain a four-star. I did not campaign for it."

"I can live with that."

"Most of the family was not convinced of the merits of your… project… until very recently, but we did not see any harm in it. I, for one, was not convinced of the immediacy of the problem until the Tiberian incident." Four of the SLN's _Gladiator_-class heavy cruisers had been destroyed by a single Manticoran CA there, and even considering the low quality of the 'pirate' crews and that they lacked the first-line SLN upgrades… that indicated serious deficiencies in the SLN's warships. Indira had strongly suspected Manticore's first line hardware had outclassed the SLN's for twenty years at that point, but that was the first demonstration of the disparities in real combat.

"That was five years ago, father."

"I could see no way to make any significant improvements in the resources available to 34th Fleet without drawing the wrong kind of attention. Accusations that a handful of old Fleet families were building their own private Navy would only make your job harder."

"You did not ask me here to apologize."

"No. You have two openings for a Vice-Admiral. I want you to take Rajiv for one of them."

Misaki Oshigiri had earned a long-deserved promotion to full Admiral and was her wall of battle commander now. And as Indira had suspected would happen, Adrienne Brock had resigned from the SLN to become the senior field commander of the Heimdall Self-Defense Force. Brock wasn't the first SLN flag officer – or even starship commander – to make a similar move in the last year. Caitlin Michaels at Rivendell had been the most spectacular – bringing an entire Frontier Fleet detachment with her, and Luis Rozack the boldest (given that the legal rights of protectorate worlds like those in the Maya Sector to secede were… unclear at best), but the scores of other, smaller-scale defections (whether their new employers had officially left the League yet or not) added yet another problem to the many the SLN was facing. It wasn't a problem she'd failed to anticipate; Indira had drawn her people in 34th Fleet from worlds that could be expected to stick with Sol to the bitter end and people who could be expected to stick with her where the former could not be found. Brock had not been an old hand with 34th Fleet despite in most ways being someone Indira would have wanted to recruit; she had been one of the squadron commanders for the two squadrons attached to her regular fleet when she was sent out to do something about Sanderson's raids on Solarian League protectorates and the Rivendell Republic making off with an entire SLN Frontier Fleet detachment in the process of seceding. But Adrienne Brock was from Heimdall, and her people had been almost certain Heimdall would not stay with Sol if the League splintered, and they had been correct.

Her nephew was more than capable, but he had never shown the signs of discontent with Battle Fleet's standard operating procedures that she looked for in people she brought into her fleet. Which was perhaps why he was already a Vice-Admiral despite being over thirty years her junior. And he would certainly tell his grandfather anything of consequence that happened with her fleet.

"He'd be my most junior squadron commander. And reporting directly to Misaki, not to me. I'd have to give him Brock's squadron; none of the old 34th Fleet squadrons would work with a commander brought in from the outside right away. And I don't know how much longer the Manties will let us use their wormhole to send dispatch boats back to Sanderson."

"I think you misunderstand. Leaving an observer with your fleet is not the primary reason why I would ask that Rajiv accompany it." He was careful not to say _spy_. "But it would be a good idea to signal to the rest of the fleet that you have my complete support."

She could live with that. And finding a better vice-admiral than her nephew on short notice would be difficult. Oshigiri's replacement would be trickier; she had not misled her father on that. If Madison Keeley had declined Admiral Michaels' offer, the Commodore could perhaps have taken over for Yao on her staff while he moved to field command. Granted, transferring someone that senior from Frontier Fleet to Battle Fleet was all but unheard of, but Michaels' chief of staff had impressed her. As it was, the most capable senior person she'd 'appropriated' from the former Rivendell Sector Frontier Fleet detachment was Captain Eric Grant, who'd also been on Michaels' staff – the line captains having all been part of the Rivendell Sector's change of allegiance. Which meant somewhat more shuffling, but ended up with another one of her old hands as a squadron commander.

"I will take him, then. And father – I'm not entirely sure earth is much safer than a fleet command for someone like us these days. So be careful."


	2. August, 1924 PD

I've decided to publish this story in larger chapters than my last one. With 'Bridge Building', I wrote the whole story before publishing any of it, and I didn't really realize until breaking it up into files along the chapter lines I'd set that some chapters were considerably longer than others. That still might happen, but I'm going for a longer lower bound this time.

**August 1924 PD**

_Sanderson System, aboard Admiral Thenuwara's flagship (formerly the _PSN Brandon IV Sanderson_)_

Indira Thenuwara was not entirely sure how the email had made it through the SLN's security software. It certainly should not have. It could not have left earth much after she did, and it was very uncertain how long the temporary, regional, and personal truce that let her take the fastest route back from Sol to her fleet would hold. Certainly the last SLN Fleet Admiral attempting to transit from Beowulf to Manticore had not been allowed to do so, though a dispatch boat was somewhat less hostile than a hundred or so of the wall. She had transited from Beowulf to Manticore to the Lynx terminus system without incident, and from the Spindle terminus system to the Rivendell terminus system without incident as well. She would have thought that, and the distances involved for a trip from Sol to Sanderson without using the Manticoran wormhole junction, would have kept disturbing email from catching up to her. She was incorrect.

"He's being circumspect, but the chairman of the Solarian Independence Party seems to be offering me command of the Sol System Navy." She told her chief of staff.

"Since Sol has no independent navy the last time I checked, and its self-defense force lacks a wall of battle – perfectly reasonable given how much of Battle Fleet is home ported there – that would seem to be difficult for him to offer. Even if the SIP controlled the Sol System government, which it does not." Rear Admiral Yao Wen said. His second star was as new as his CO's fifth, and before Sanderson, neither had expected promotion any time soon. The notion that Battle Fleet ought to spent most of its efforts actually preparing to fight had not been popular until recently, which explained why a Thenuwara with Indira's seventy years in uniform lacked a fifth star, and a Wen with Yao's sixty had been a mere Commodore.

Ten years ago the SIP was a fringe radical party no one took seriously. Now, they had ten percent of the members in the lower house of the Sol System Parlaiment, where members were allocated by proportional voting by party. In the upper house, where members had to contest districts individually, the SIP only had a handful of representatives, mostly from Belter communities. But they were growing fast; if current trends continued, the next round of elections would likely give one of the two traditional major parties the difficult choice of allying with its traditional rival or the SIP in order to form a government. And they wanted no part of the Solarian League.

What Thenuwara – and the Marine Intelligence she relied on for political assessments, Battle Fleet's official intelligence data being somewhat useless – did not know was how real the SIP was. The growing hostility to the League they had tapped into was a very real sentiment. But whether that sentiment had been created and nurtured deliberately by the conspiracy the Manties and their friends were calling the Mesan Alignment was something she could only guess at. If the SIP were legitimate reformers, and actually seceded from the League, Thenuwara and the rest of 34th Fleet would have a difficult decision to make.

"If this is not a setup, I'd like to know why he thought I could be sympathetic. SLN personnel records are not public information, and no one outside of 34th Fleet's squadron commanders and my staff should be aware of my thinking on certain… long-term problems. And Jared, of course." She said. And her father, but a leak there seemed even less likely than from one of her staff.

Jared Richt's Frontier Fleet Task Force 1321, home-ported a scant sixty light-years from earth, was a rather important part of her planning, given that Battle Fleet maintained far too few organic escorts for proper screen and scouting roles. If Thenuwara was lucky, no one was aware that they had any connection at all prior to being assigned the task of rolling back Harriet II Sanderson's conquest of a handful of OFS Protectorates near the Rivendell Sector. That Richt had been maneuvering core worlders serving in Frontier Fleet with talent and the right attitude into Task Force 1321 as long as she'd been doing the same with Battle Fleet's 34th Fleet. That they had been friends since attending the most exclusive of the SLN's many military prep schools was something very, very few remembered. When she'd selected Task Force 1321 s to accompany 34th Fleet to Rivendell and Sanderson, no one had remarked on it, at any rate.

"Get a message back to him. Be even more circumspect, but tell him that right now he has nothing to offer. If he truly has a command to give, then we might be able to discuss things."

[break]

Rajiv Thenuwara had been given a full official briefing on his new assignment by Admiral Kingsford, informally briefed by his grandfather, and his aunt had even spoken to him in person before they left earth. Nonetheless, there had been things she did not tell him until a few days after they passed through the Spindle-Rivendell wormhole bridge and were in space that was not claimed by the fledgling Rivendell Republic or the Star Empire of Manticore. Most notably, somehow the 28 captured SD(P)s from the Princedom of Sanderson Navy seemed to have acquired Solarian crews.

He hadn't expected that. Under normal circumstances, operating a captured ship could be a logistical nightmare. Even if the tech base it had been built from was basically similar, a fair amount of refit was needed just to ensure software compatibility and the ability to share consumables like missiles and counter-missiles. That was the nominal reason why GIT had spent a year studying and updating the PSN's designs before laying down what were intended to be the SLN's first SD(P)s. However, the logistical problems were nowhere near as bad in this case, as the SLN had not merely captured the ships – his aunt (and her allies, but they'd left administering Sanderson to the League) had captured the yard complex where they were built, too. And as crude as the _Prince of Sanderson_-class SD(P)s were in a lot of ways, they were still far more capable combatants than the _Vegas_ and _Scientists_ that were the backbone of Battle Fleet.

He'd asked his aunt where she found the crews for them, but it was obvious. Eight of her SD(P)s had been knocked out of the battle of Sanderson. Eight others had remained combat-capable but sustained heavy damage. The members of Rivendell's Frontier Fleet detachment who had not wanted to take service with the Rivendell Republic. And careful raiding of the rest of the fleet for officers had supplied the rest. He wouldn't be commanding any of the PSN ships, though, just what used to be Adrienne Brock's squadron. His aunt had stripped two of his division commanders to man the captured ships – a quick check showed everyone in the fleet was operating with four-ship divisions. She could have brought more officers with them from Sol, but Rajiv was sure his aunt had her reasons.

[break]

_Osgiliath orbit,_ _Rivendell System, General Dynamics of Rivendell shipyard complex_

General Dynamics' people hated to admit it, but the advisors the Manticorans had sent helped a lot. The first eighteen of Rivendell's _Aes Sedai_ class DN(P)s had outclassed any waller not built by the Manticoran Alliance in most respects. The third and fourth flights, which had incorporated substantial Alliance technology in their last year (or last two years, in the fourth flight's case) of construction, were very nearly ton for ton matches to anything Manticore had built. Designing the Dreamwalker II platforms had been the most difficult part of the upgrades their new allies had engineered; Rivendell's DN(P) design had no room for a single platform the size of Keyhole II, but failing to upgrade the last two flights of _Aes Sedai_ to be able to handle Apollo would have seemed a poor trade off to the people who were being asked to build the Grand Alliance's missiles. Oh, they had still gone ahead with the new lines at Beowulf and San Martin and were even beginning to build one out at Bolthole, but General Dynamics' lines at Rivendell had been far closer to ready when the project had begun – Rivendell's Callandor missile was rather closer to a Mark 23 than anything anyone else had – and General Dynamics was already producing the full spectrum of Manticoran missile designs in volume while the other lines were still ramping up.

Some of Admiral Michaels' people weren't happy with the new pods. Trading twelve Callandor missiles for seven Mark 23s and one Apollo control missile hurt offensive missile capacity a lot; Rivendell's standard missile pod design was smaller than the RMN's, and the eight in the RMN's 'flatpack' design simply would not fit in an _Aes Sedai_'s rails. Fortunately, there was no technical reason an Apollo control missile couldn't handle nine or even ten missiles, so one of the five pod rails of a Flight III _Aes Sedai_ held pods with 10 Mark 23s and no control missile. And she was convinced that the proponents of sticking with the RN's own missiles didn't fully appreciate how effective Apollo's FTL fire control was.

The last flight of _Aes Sedai_ were not the most impressive ships in General Dynamics' yards, though. The only six _Asha'man_ class SD(P)s that would ever be built were not either; like the Aes Sedai they were largely scaled-up versions of, they were not designed to accommodate something like Keyhole II, so they would use the same Dreamwalker II platforms the last two flights of _Aes Sedai_ used. And in new dispersed building slips cluttering the orbit of Osgiliath (largest moon of the Rivendell system's lone gas giant), over a dozen more SD(P)s were in the earliest stages of construction.

In the Rivendell Navy's service, they had been designated the _Allomancer_ class, but in truth they were a very lightly modified version of the Grayson Navy's _Harrington II_ class (the most important change was leaving space for an oversized hyper generator, on the assumption that the Mesan 'streak drive' would be reverse engineered). Manticore had designated the variant as an _Invictus-B_, and it was as yet unclear what Haven and Beowulf would call them. No matter what they were called, they would be the most powerful conventional warships in space when completed. It wasn't entirely clear who would be the final owners of all the SD(P)s that were being built in Rivendell's yards, but they were building a lot of them, and not just at Rivendell.

Admiral Michaels didn't get out to the yard complex very often. Her normal duty station was her desk in Rivendell Navy Headquarters. Taking almost half of the Rivendell Navy's wall of battle out under her personal command last year had been well outside her normal job description, but there had not been anyone else she trusted to do it at the time. Now, Wes Marrone was back – albeit in command of the Grand Alliance Rivendell Task Force, not the Rivendell Navy's Home Fleet. And after a month as a prisoner of the Princedom of Sanderson and six months of rehab, so was Steve Carroll.

"I'm sorry you're stuck with the first two flights of _Aes Sedai_ in Home Fleet." She told Admiral Carroll. "But eventually we're going to find out where the rats fled Mesa for. And if that's closer to us than to Manticore, Wes is going after them. "

"It makes sense. Wes' task force – fleet, really – seems to be where our Grand Alliance is figuring out how to do joint operations. And everyone seems in a hurry to get their latest and greatest out here. Haven swapped out their original squadron for one of the first out of Bolthole designed to pick up Keyhole II modules from Beowulf, and another with the same specs is here flying Beowulf colors. The Graysons sent two more carriers. We even have a squadron of 'Erewhonese' light cruisers here making a 'courtesy call' – they're really Maya Sector, and really assigned to Wes' fleet, of course."

"Still, I'm glad to have you back even if I couldn't give you our nicest toys. I can't think of anyone better to give Home Fleet to." She told him. There had always been the worry that whoever got the Chief of Naval Operations job immediately after White City would be a partisan of his or her former service, whether that was the Rivendell Navy or the Rivendell Sector Detachment of the SLN's Frontier Fleet. But in the year and a half since Michaels had been in command of both services, she had largely managed to avoid it. True, her senior staff were mostly drawn from her former staff in the SLN, and the officers commanding the Rivendell Navy's ships of the wall – and squadrons thereof – were largely drawn from the Rivendell Navy. But that only made sense; anyone in Michaels' job would want her own people for most of her staff, and it was hardly possible to get experience commanding ships of the wall in Frontier Fleet. She'd taken personal command of some of the Rivendell Navy's wall last year, but that had been an extraordinary circumstance she had no intention of repeating.

She had been glad to see Carroll, and to review the new construction, but that wasn't truly why she'd come out here. There was one more thing she wanted to get a look at in person before heading back to headquarters. One of the Marines standing guard on the door was a Rivendell Navy lifer, and even a Ranger and she had the lithe, deadly grace that all of them did. The Republic had never had any large ground combat arms, but its Marines knew the work and the Rangers tried their very best to be worthy of their namesake. The other was a loner from Manticore whose credentials, she understood, were just as impressive. But he was really there because he could talk to the third guard. She understood why there was a Sphinxian treecat guarding that door, but there weren't any nonhuman sentient beings native to any of the Republic's five worlds. Certainly not furry, six-legged telepathic ones.

The 'cat's hands flashed.

"Far Strider thinks you're really you, Admiral. So you're clear to go in."

"Wouldn't it be fairly simple to rig up a sign to speech translation device?" She asked.

"And once someone thought of that, they made a killing selling them back on Sphinx. However, most of us two-legs don't understand sign language, and that clever little guy over there sometimes would like to get a message to me that an enemy probably wouldn't understand."

The cat's true-hands signed again.

"He says it's not his fault two-legs are mind-blind." And they let her into what was quite possibly the most secure facility in the Grand Alliance, with the possible exception of Bolthole.

"Good afternoon, Admiral." Dr. Kara Fey said. "Welcome to project Parker."

"When I saw you'd been assigned to head this project, I thought I'd misread. Aren't you a specialist on wormhole junctions?"

"It's more of sideline – which is true of just about anyone in the Republic who studies them at all. Until last year we didn't have one of our own, which made research difficult. I knew more than almost anyone else on Rivendell on the subject, but my real expertise is in detecting unusual hyperspace phenomena."

"And you had something to show me?"

"It's purely in models right now, but if they're accurate – both of how the Mesan's stealth drive system works and of how our toys should work – then we may have at least a little bit of spider-sense soon."

Project Parker had two goals, both considered absolutely critical by the Grand Alliance. The first was discovering how the 'spider' drive worked, and the second was figuring out how to detect a ship using it (and the best possible stealth technology). Given the elves' proclivities, the project inevitably got named after the Spider-Man.

It wasn't the only project to develop a means of detecting the spider drive. A fairly large project at Bolthole had the same aim. But that project was based on trying to detect things that any ship should have regardless of its drive source – effects based on visible light or heat for the most part. Given the FTL capability of Alliance recon drones, there was an argument that the approach Bolthole was taking would be good enough if it worked. But Michaels, like most of the combat-experienced officers who'd considered the problem of the spider drive, believed it would be far more difficult to hunt down spider drive ships if some kind of gravitic signature from them could not be found.

Dr. Fey started running her simulation, and the electronic model of a conventional recon drone showed nothing of consequence despite being right in the simulated path of her simulated spider-drive ship. But the model of her team's new sensor… that showed something.

"We should have test bed physical models built in a month." She said. "And then we'll be sure that this is something, not just numbers in a computer. Even that won't confirm we've reverse-engineered the 'spider drive' properly; we've taken the general principles that Dr. Simoёs outlined and come up with a way that could work, but it's not definite that it's the same way the Mesan drive does. My team and I are convinced it's close enough, though."

[break]

_Darius System_

Albrecht Detweiller was not happy with the reports in front of him. The League was collapsing, Manticore's industrial plant was a smoldering ruin they were nowhere near close to rebuilding, and almost all of the Alignment's top people had safely evacuated Mesa. But too much had gone wrong in unanticipated ways.

"All our analysts are saying Thenuwara and Rivendell are going to be even bigger problems than we had guessed last year." He said. "On one hand, an independent Sol with a navy led by Thenuwara's people and possessing adequate hardware is going to make rolling the League up into the Factor very difficult. On the other, we expected if Rivendell wasn't taken down a peg they'd become a troubling second-tier nexus opposed to us. We did not anticipate them becoming almost as important as Haven and Beowulf in supplying the so-called Grand Alliance with things Manticore can't build right now."

"So I suppose it's good that I have a plan for doing something about that problem, then?" His son Colin asked.

"Only if it's a good one."

When Colin explained, his father agreed. It could work, and the riskiest parts would not risk anyone important. So he approved it. Colin neglected to mention that he'd already begun.


	3. September, 1924 PD

**September 1924 PD**

_Solarian Independence Party Headquarters, Luna, Sol System_

"You'll lose a lot of our most dedicated supporters if you do this." Kevin Diaz' chief of staff told him. Zara was very good at her job; she'd gone from being an unpaid volunteer to Kevin's chief of staff in less than three years, and in that time the party had gone from a lunatic fringe organization to a minor party with representation in both houses of the Sol System government. Part of that rise was the appeal of an anti-League message in these times. Part of it was Kevin's natural charisma and political acumen. But a lot of it was Zara's talent for organization, even if she was a touch more radical than Kevin would like. Ex-Manpower slaves tended to be, even if they were not inclined to join the Ballroom.

"If we and the other independence movements can work out an agreement in principle for a new multi-system entity among the deep core worlds, we'll gain far more support than we'll lose. Besides, it's what I've been aiming for all along."

"You didn't let that stop you from putting up 'Sol for the Solarians' banners running up to the last election."

"I didn't think anyone else was ready to leave the League yet. Except Beowulf, and talking to them would have been political suicide then. Or Rivendell, and they're much too far away to be of any use to us."

"You're the boss." She said. "But don't say I didn't warn you if this crashes and burns."

[break]

_A small café near Solarian Independence Party Headquarters, Luna, Sol System_

"He's going to do exactly what we want." Zara told her colleague. "He's more idealistic than almost anyone in politics in the Sol system, but he still has the basic instinct to run the other way when a starry-eyed radical suggests a direction. Still, aren't you worried he might actually pull it off? If the elections were held today, he'd control the balance of power, and the leadership of the Alliance for Freedom and One Sol have loathed each other for half a century. Beyond that, a lot of trans-stellars are sending money their way."

The Alliance for Freedom and One Sol had both been radical new parties once, but for nearly a century they had been the dominant parties of the 'right' and 'left' in the Sol System government. Until recently, they'd controlled over eighty percent of the electorate between the two of them, with various minor parties making up the rest. Diaz' SIP had snatched ten percent in the last round of elections, and seemed certain to at least double that in the next.

And while none of the huge interstellar corporations that did business on Earth had any inclination to support upending the status quo in the abstract, a lot of them were adamantly opposed to the picking fights with Manticore. At least, they were opposed to picking fights that couldn't be won; closing the wormhole network to League shipping was costing many of the trans-stellars a great deal of money, and they wanted that stopped. It really didn't matter to them whether it was stopped due to pressure on the Mandrins or the SIP actually achieving its goal of a Sol outside the League or even by some Manty Admiral dictating terms from Earth orbit.

"Our analysis suggests things ought to be wrapped up within five years as far as the military side goes. And it's hard to see how any Sol-based political entity can be a player of consequence before then. Besides," The other woman said. "He's not going to pull it off." And she gave her agent (and to all outside appearances, her lover) a kiss goodbye.

It was easy enough to believe a former 'pleasure slave' had sworn off men. And when the Alignment had decided the SIP was worth infiltrating, if only just to observe at first, interesting but uninterested had been seen as the best cover for someone working with Kevin. The man was a gifted if overly idealistic politician, but he would have made a play for her if he thought he had any chance. And Zara had no intention of getting too tightly tangled with him; he was small change when all was said and done. The entire Sol system was small change.

[break]

_Solarian League Office of Operational Analysis HQ, Earth_

"Do you know anything about Indira Thenuwara?" Irene Teague asked her co-conspirator.

"Nothing that's not public knowledge, no. Her star is rising since the Battle of Sanderson, even if she 'let' the elves walk away with a Frontier Fleet detachment, but she's never been very popular with a lot of… more traditional… elements within Battle Fleet and that's truer now than ever." Daud al-Fanudahi replied.

"How far do you think they'd go against her?"

"I can't imagine anything beyond the usual bureaucratic infighting. Moving too forcefully against her would make enemies of the whole Thenuwara clan, and most of them are not quixotic characters like Battle Fleet's newest Fleet Admiral. Why do you ask?"

"Because I got wind of an internal affairs investigation into her ties with the Solarian Independence Party. It's in the very preliminary stages, but it feels like there are some very major movers and shakers involved."

"The SIP may have been fairly fringe until recently, but it's a legitimate political party here in the Sol system. The only thing she could do that would merit more than a mild official reprimand would be promising military support for a coup, and I can't imagine she would do that."

"On the other hand, suggesting she might could well take down not just Fleet Admiral Thenuwara, but all of her senior subordinates as well."

"It would take more than jealousy to convince even the more stubborn of our colleagues to cashier the only officers who have won a fleet engagement in the last fifty years."

"Then unless we want to posit yet another conspiracy, we know who is really behind this. Proving it, on the other hand, could be more difficult."

[break]

_Michael S. Garrett Royal Prison, near Caemlyn, Princedom of Sanderson_

"Thank you for agreeing to let us interview him." Lt. Yuan Xing of the Rivendell Navy's Intelligence Corps said to the prison guard on duty. It was important to keep up pretenses. In this case, officially a request to interview the Princedom's former intelligence chief had been made by the Republic of Rivendell to the new government of the Princedom of Sanderson. Unofficially, the request came from somewhere in the Grand Alliance's collective intelligence apparatus, and had been made to Fleet Admiral Thenuwara, who held the Princedom's high orbitals and had forced the change in government. And officially Lt. Xing was the lead, with Lt. (jg) Andrew Mendoza of RMN Intelligence merely her assistant. In fact, the Sphinxian treecat accompanying Mendoza was the real lead investigator.

The former intelligence chief had insisted on his attorney's presence, and his interrogators had agreed that he did legally have the right to consul, under Sanderson, League, Manticoran, and Rivendellian law.

"If you had any serious charges to bring, I'm sure this spineless new government of Admiral Thenuwara's would have made them already." He said. "So what do you want?"

"We're not here to make any new charges against you. There are simply some questions that recently came to our governments' attention that you should know the answer to." Lt. Xing said.

"I have already told the new government's people everything they asked that would not be a violation of my oaths to the Princess."

_ «He believes that to be true.» _ Sharp Mind signed.

"At the time of the Princedom's attack on the Rivendell Terminus system, its location was not public. And there are a fair number of uninhabited systems within the boundaries of the Republic." Xing continued.

"Yes, the old Rivendell Republic claimed a great many of them for 'security reasons' and the League did recognize that claim when they brought the old Republic into the League. The Princedom never recognized those claims."

She didn't need the treecat's signing to know that was pure bluster. If the League recognized a claim on a system, it was accepted. If they cared enough, Manticore could challenge that. The Princedom of Sanderson could not.

"What concerns our governments, though, is how your government learned which of those systems held the wormhole bridge terminus. Our interviews with your former government and military personnel claimed the information was provided by your agency."

"We did some fairly extensive data analysis to narrow the possibilities."

_ «True, but he's hiding something.» _ The 'cat added.

"That would not have given you the location soon enough, without a great deal of luck." She said.

"We received an anonymous tip. And made rather extensive efforts to track down where that tip came from, without much success. The records of that investigation should not have been purged."

_ «He believes this.» _Sharp Mind confirmed.

"Thank you. That was most helpful." She said.

After they were ought of hearing range of the former intelligence chief, though, Mendoza spoke up.

"Of course, trying to track down the probable Alignment operative who tipped him off a year ago isn't likely to be helpful, even with my furry friend."

_ «But I'm certainly going to try.» _ He signed.

[break]

_Heinlein Station, Centaurian Union of Free Habitats_

Kevin had always had a flair for the dramatic, and gathering on mankind's oldest habitation outside the Sol System was certainly that. The slowboat that eventually became the core of Heinlein Station was not the first colony ship to leave humanity's home system. It was, however, the first to reach its destination. Its settlers had been mostly from Sol's asteroid belt, and their goal had simply to get beyond the reach of Sol's government. They knew how to live in space, and did not want to take the time trying to find and terraform a planet. So they had stocked an interstellar ship, and planned to make it their home permanently.

Over the centuries, Heinlein Station had grown, and scores of stations filled out the Alpha Centauri system now. Its population was quite low for a full league member; with no habitable planets, growth had to be carefully managed. But there were still hundreds of millions of people there these days. And fifteen of those, including Kevin, were leaders of independence movements from deep core worlds.

"Even for your people, it looked like there was a lot of construction going on when I came in." Kevin told his Centaurian counterpart.

"Long-haul trade networks are in shambles. People all over the league are trying to expand local industrial production. And when they need new space stations quickly, they talk to us." Fab modules and pre-fab space habitat components had been one of the Centaurian Union's biggest exports since multi-megaton cargo ships had become practical. They needed them to keep up with their own growth; building some capacity for export was natural. And since they were building the same designs they used for their own people (barring modifications for local conditions), what the Centaurians built was of very high quality, especially for the price

"That might explain some of it, but even a politician like your truly can recognize a military shipyard when he sees one."

"I can't tell you more than public record on that. I may be the leader of a minor party here in the Union, but I'm still an elected representative and some parts of our defense budget are classified. We are expanding and modernizing our SDF, but the details of with what… well, if your plans and mine and ours succeed, you'll be able to ask through official channels and get an answer. But right now, I can't tell you, Kevin."

"I understand. No one's backing out at the last second, right?"

"I don't think so. A few of our little circle who have been closer to the political mainstream of their respective home worlds for a longer time are a bit nervous, but everyone realizes how badly closing the wormhole network is hurting us, and that we can't fix the kind of problems that dragged us into a war with Manticore without making fundamental change."

"Good." Kevin said.

A few hours later, he and the other fourteen signed their names to a document that began in a direct quote.

_When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation…_


	4. October, 1924 PD

October, 1924 PD

_Sanderson System, aboard Admiral Thenuwara's flagship_

Fleet Admiral Thenuwara had seen the news reports of the SIP's declaration three days ago. Theirs and fourteen other independence-minded parties in the deep core of the Solarian League. On one level, it was exactly what she wanted. The worlds represented by the signatories to Diaz' declaration were the homes of over ninety percent of the crew in her fleet. And a new government created under the principles of that declaration would be one she and her people would be proud to serve. But things were moving too fast. She wished she could move her fleet back to the Sol system and cut two weeks of message delays. She supposed she shouldn't complain; without access to the wormhole network, her news from Sol would be six weeks old instead of two, but she was worried things could fall apart on Sol and she would not be able to do anything. Trusting her father, who had only let her know he'd supported her efforts all along months ago, seemed a thin reed to hold on to.

She did not trust anyone else in the SLN with protecting the very secret R&D and construction happening at Sanderson. And while other Battle Fleet Admirals could eventually learn pod-based tactics given three and a half squadrons of SD(P)s to play with, it would take them quite a bit longer. They'd need to make all the mistakes the Manties and Havenites had made themselves, instead of learning from their experience. But if she could have her fleet in two places at once, she would have done it.

"And Raina's letter has me even more concerned." She told Admiral Richt, who was dining with her. Commander Raina Thenuwara was her grand-niece, and assigned to Battle Fleet's side of Operational Analysis. "A captain in her section apparently asked her if she could get a letter to me without alerting anyone higher up. She would have expected a trap, except that the captain has been embarrassingly paranoid about Haven sector military for years before we started shooting at them."

"I heard something similar from Stephanie." He said. That would be his cousin's daughter and a Frontier Fleet intelligence junior captain. "This sounds… very serious. With that kind of charges, against all of your senior staff, they could easily send a fleet out here to shoot first and ask questions later."

"If I had to order my people to fire on the SLN, I was really hoping to be out of it first."

"I didn't think we'd be in this kind of situation when I signed up for your crazy scheme either, Indira." Admiral Richt said. "Lately I've been thinking we sacrificed some things to it that we didn't need to."

"When we were twenty, we were just kids – kids with second-gen prolong who ought to live a long time since no one was fool enough to fight the SLN. When we were fifty and just seeing the edges of the problems that became 'my little scheme' I started getting worried about us being seen to be close. And we'd exchanged no vows, and even had other relationships from time to time. Agreeing to keep 'us' under the radar seemed like a good idea, and we'd gone years without seeing each other before. It took me a while to realize that by the time anyone got around to looking, things would be much too far gone for the lack of any formal relationship between us to stop anyone moving against me or you from following on."

"Unfortunately, we've realized this while you actually are my commanding officer. Still, if we survive long enough that we're not in the SLN and I'm not under your direct command, sixty-odd years is a long enough courtship, don't you think?"

"Yes, Jared, I do."

He didn't leave her cabin until the next morning.

[break]

_Osgiliath orbit,_ _Rivendell System, near the General Dynamics of Rivendell shipyard complex_

"Release from the cradle." A tech said, and the drone was drifting in space. "It's your show now, Dr. Fey."

"Engage the spider drive, minimum acceleration." Or rather, their best guess at one right now. Two months ago, she'd shown Admiral Michaels a model. Today, they'd find out if the real universe's physics agreed with their simulation of it. But the drone crept forward.

"No gravitic signature on the standard recon drone." Another tech reported. "Visual and thermal are tracking." They had not, for this first trial run, built any stealth features into the spider drive drone.

"And the … special… one?" Dr. Fey asked.

"Nothing, nothing, and there's a blip." A third technician said. "The effective range is a lot shorter than standard graviitcs, and we're not trying to apply any other stealth tech to the spider drone yet, but we've definitely got something here. Unless the Mesan's drive is similar in abstract principles, but completely different in implementation."

"Step up the acceleration and try again." They cycled through the battery of tests ten times in all, going from .1g to the 20g that was the maximum the test drone had been designed for.

A few hours later, she looked up from the results of her test.

"What we have may not be _exactly_ how the Mesans did it, but it certainly produces the same signature the Manties and Graysons are sure belonged to their 'mystery attackers'. And it least in the bounds of our test, our detector works. Excellent work, all of you."

[break]

_Caemlyn, Princedom of Sanderson_

"How long are we going to keep this up before we admit we're looking for a needle in a haystack, and the haystack is just too big?" Lt. Xing asked. They'd found some leads that Sanderson's intelligence services had not, but so far the anonymous tipster – and almost certain Mesan operative – had eluded them.

"As long as it takes. Do you want to give up and report failure to Victor Cachat?" Lt. Mendoza replied.

"Cachat is not in my chain of command. He's not in yours, either. And he's definitely not in Sharp Mind's."

"But you know where this mission came from." 'Special assignments' from 'Grand Alliance Intelligence'? Well, it was possible a certain noted Havenite agent wasn't behind them. Likely? Not so much.

_«And unlike you two-legs, I think we're making progress. »_ Sharp Mind signed. The Princedom's former intelligence service's attempts to trace the tip had run to ground at the store where the disposable comm the call had been placed from came from. The person who bought it had seemed very sincere when he claimed it had been stolen shortly after he purchased it. He'd even reported the theft to the police, and claimed he didn't get a good look at the thief. Sharp Mind, though, could tell he was hiding something. A bit of well-directed interrogation (Sharp Mind didn't even need to show his claws) had revealed that the man who'd purchased the comm had been paid several times the cost by a stranger, who had then never showed up to claim his merchandise. But following security camera footage, someone who could have been the thief also 'bumped' a man who had spoken to the comm purchaser before he entered the store.

The actual thief hadn't been hard to locate; a fairly skilled pickpocket who had been suspected a few times but never with enough evidence for a conviction. Unfortunately, they'd found a corpse rather than someone they could ask more questions of. The person who had been the ultimate recipient of the comm had proved harder to trace.

"In a lot of ways I wish we could show he'd gone off-planet, as long as he didn't sneak on to a private yacht." Xing said.

_«They never say so, but these people do not seem to like us much. »_ Sharp Mind signed.

"Technically the Sollies forced a new government on them, not us, but they couldn't have done it over our objections. And while Harriet II Sanderson might not have been popular on some of the worlds she or her father conquered, here on Sanderson was another story. Forcing them to sell a Solarian contractor a shipyard set up to build ships of the wall a good two generations more advanced than SLN standard issue had to rub a lot of them the wrong way, too. It's not hard to see why elves and Manticorans and Sollies are not so popular in Caemlyn." Mendoza said.

"And that passing through a public, well-monitored spaceport – which describes every spaceport on this planet – would give us a much smaller set of targets than an entire planet, too." Xing finished.

"We've got programs in place to catch him if he shows up on any public security camera, assuming he hasn't changed his appearance enough to fool them. Since Ruth and Anton gave them a once-over after NavInt's boys did the development, there's at least a chance things that our Alignment agent would expect to work will not." Mendoza said.

_«We're making progress. »_ Sharp Mind signed. _«But I hate waiting. »_

[break]

_New Capetown system, aboard Admiral Wesley Marrone's flagship_

The operation to seize the New Capetown-New Beijing Bridge had been a bit of test for Wes Marrone's task force. They had been training for nearly a year with mixed task forces from all the Grand Alliance partners who could spare ships for it. Even in the defense of the Manticoran home system, the Havenite forces had only coordinated with the RMN at the highest level. What Marrone was trying to do was make a division of Rivendell dreadnoughts, a division of Havenite SDs, a division of Manticoran SDs, an 'Erewhonese' light cruiser squadron and a Grayson carrier group act as one squadron. The process had more than a few bumps – some of which had been smoothed out as hardware closer to Manticore/Grayson levels had become available to other alliance partners, and others just by experience – but Marrone thought he could even match an all-Manticoran task force ton for ton at this point. His hardware might not be quite as good, but the Alliance had sent him very good people; Starks might have been a touch overconfident the first time he'd exercised against Marrone back in the Manticore binary system, but Marrone had absolutely no worries about him commanding the squadron on the other side of the bridge. And he was similarly impressed by the other senior officers of his task force.

It was true that he'd hit both ends of the bridge with heavier forces than Manticore had used for most of the Case Lacoön raids, which had discouraged futile attempts to hold them. But he'd had reason for that. This particular bridge had a much higher chance than most of an attempt to retake it. The SLN almost certainly had no illusions it could force its way through the Manticoran Wormhole Junction and on to the Spindle-Rivendell bridge, but shaving three weeks off of the trip from Sanderson – where the most advanced ships and missiles the SLN was building were being constructed – might well seem important to Solarian officials less clear-headed than Indira Thenuwara. So presenting actual ships of the wall at both ends of the bridge seemed like a good idea for now.

"Admiral, the picket's reporting four Solarian light cruisers hypered in and fired off recon drones, but stayed beyond the hyper limit and immediately started cycling up their hyper generators again. Given that our mission was to have a noticeable presence, we didn't shoot them down." And even with FTL comm, it was too late to overrule the picket captains, but he had no desire to. If the SLN had something they thought could take a Grand Alliance squadron of wallers and screen heading this way, he wanted to know it.

"Let it go by, just like we planned things." He said.

[break]

_Mandela system, aboard the SLNS Currie_

Fleet Admiral Koh was disappointed, but not surprised when his scouts reported two each of Rivendell DNs, Havenite SDs, Manticoran SDs, and unknown waller-sized ships at New Capetown. Along with a squadron each of BCs and light cruisers. At least the BCs weren't those 2 Megaton Manticoran monstrosities that had been reported from Talbot. He supposed declining to face six to eight of the wall with over one hundred would normally be seen as cowardice. But he had a mission to accomplish.

"Send a dispatch boat to HQ and tell them we're taking the long way to Canton and awaiting further orders there."

He knew what orders to expect, and did not see any choice but to plan on obeying them. It was far, far too late for him to back out now.


	5. November, 1924 PD

**November, 1924 PD**

_New Beijing System, aboard HMS Lynx_

"… This notice constitutes your promotion to Vice-Admiral. Neither I nor anyone in the Grand Alliance command can think of anyone better suited than you to serve as second in command of the Rivendell task force."

In some ways that had surprised Ted Starks. He'd left the Navy once after putting his twenty T-years in before the first Havenite war, and again rather than serve in Janacek's navy. The officers he had graduated from Saganami Island with were at least as senior, if they'd stayed in the Navy and survived, but he'd retired once as a commander, and once as a newly-promoted commodore whose squadron would have seen its first action in latter stages of Buttercup.

And his original orders when he'd been slated to take command of a squadron of brand-new Invictus-class SD(P)s would have sent him to 10th Fleet. All six were named after member systems of the Star Empire on that side of the Lynx terminus, after all. Those orders had changed. First to keep him in the home system through the Solarian and Mesan attacks, and then to head out to Rivendell in support of the Star Empire's new allies. Still, another RMN SD(P) squadron was coming out to Rivendell, along with a carrier and some screening elements, and Starks guessed that Caparelli didn't want the senior RMN officer to be only a Rear Admiral.

He hadn't thought the powers that be would fast-track someone who had clearly shown he'd prefer to be a civilian. Which was true; if he was fairly certain the Star Kingdom – no, the Star Empire – was at peace and it would last, he'd return to merchant service fairly quickly. Sadly, he saw no sign of that any time soon, and he supposed his track record did say that he might be fairly competent at war.

His musings were interrupted by a page from his comm officer. "_Benton_ is back, and Commander Paris is asking to confer with you over FTL rather than wait to get in."

"Patch her through to my stateroom, then." One of the bigger challenges in operating the Rivendell task force as a unified fleet, rather than a collection of squadrons under the same high command, was the different traditions involved. A Grayson would certainly have waited to speak to him in person, and another Manticoran probably would have. Starks certainly couldn't do anything significant based on what she said before the Beowulf-flagged light cruiser _Benton_ caught up to the rest of them. But the Solarian tradition – and the Maya Sector, Beowulf and especially Rivendellian forces in the fleet had definitely grown out of the Solarian tradition, even if all had a great deal of contempt for much of the SLN – held that given the extremely capable electronic communication equipment any modern warship carried, there wasn't all that much value on face to face meetings. Striking a balance had been tricky.

"Admiral Marrone was right, sir. The fleet that left Mandela last month seems to be at Canton for now. I'm surprised a force that big didn't move against us at New Capetown, or at least here. We know how bad of an idea that is, but I haven't seen anyone in the SLN outside of Admiral Thenuwara's fleet that has even close to an accurate understanding of our capabilities." And when Thenuwara had seen the task force in action, Starks' RMN squadron had been the only part of it with Apollo.

"Even the slowest child learns not to stick his hand in the fire after he's burned enough times. Alternatively, we may have run into a brighter than average SLN fleet commander. Thank you for the report." He said and then formally concluded the conversation.

"I'm going to need to put together some messages for the next dispatch boat back to Rivendell and on to home, and another one through the wormhole to Admiral Marrone. We haven't been moving against Battle Fleet concentrations except when they actually attacked Alliance worlds. And while I'm not sure what that many SLN wallers could be doing out here, I can't think it's anything good."

[break]

_Solarian League Office of Operational Analysis HQ, Earth_

Irene Teague thought their conspiracy was risky enough, without drawing anyone else into it. Unfortunately, they'd already needed to draw Raina Thenuwara into the edges to get a warning to her aunt. And then one of their Marine 'friends' had suggested a perfect way to smoke out the Alignment operative tied to the SIP. If the Mesans were planning what she and Daud thought they were, there was very little chance they wouldn't take the bait. She just hoped Commander Thenuwara was up to it. It had been weeks since they kicked off the operation, and it seemed like it should work, but

Teague's comm chimed. "I've got the package, but you'll have to pick it up." Raina's voice said.

A few minutes later, Teague – and a squad of Marine Intelligence personnel, including a doctor, were at Commander Thenuwara's apartment. And Zara Meyer, chief of staff to the most vocal figure in the Solarian Independence Party, was lying unconscious on her couch. "This had better be for real. Even what you had me doing was legally questionable; what you asked me to hint my aunt was capable of doing is arguably treason; and what your people are doing now would be criminal if she were not a suspected foreign agent."

Raina seemed surprised by how carefully they examined the unconscious woman.

"They're checking for suicide devices, of any sort they can think of. She definitely had a poison tooth. It seems unlikely a Mesan agent would go for anything noisy that would take nearby people out along with themselves, but you can't be too sure."

"No one warned me about that. You just said to invite anyone who approached you at the rallies back to your place, and if anyone did more than once, give them a spiked drink."

"What was in that drink, Raina?" Zara groggily said. But she saw a lot more uniforms around than just that not-as-idealistic-as-she'd-seemed commander. There could be only one reason for that.

"I'm afraid we pulled your suicide tooth." The doctor said. "I don't suppose you would care to explain how a former Manpower slave came to be fitted with one?"

[break]

_Sanderson System, aboard Admiral Thenuwara's flagship_

"It looks like we've got enough mod 9s to retire the Cataphract-Cs." Commodore Yu Wen reported. The Sanderson Mod 7 missile was, on balance, probably a better capital missile than the Cataphract-C, but it was very much an example of improvised engineering. One in twenty of the missiles failed outright when they lit up their second stage. The Sandersons had a follow-on design in the pipeline that likely would have reduced the failure rate to one in a hundred. GIT's engineers, on the other hand, had applied first-line Solarian analysis equipment to the basic model the Sandersons had for reducing interference between stages of an MDM. They'd managed to eliminate the need for the 'pop-out' separation between stages entirely. And using the same capacitor technology GIT had provided to the Republic of Haven (the SLN had not been interested in paying for it) had improved the energy budget tremendously. Maintaining the same size for the missile body meant they were still very large missiles, but it also meant heavier warheads, higher acceleration, better EW capabilities, and more time before burn-out. It would be another two years before the twenty-four new _Admiral_-class SD(P)s under construction were ready, but the mod 9s would improve her capabilities a fair bit right now.

"Excellent. Unfortunately, my sources are pretty sure Koh is command of the fleet at Canton. Which means that whatever it's supposed to be doing out here, we're not going to like it. If it was to attack Manticore's allies, bypassing the forces they have on either side of the New Capetown – New Beijing Bridge would seem insane to the overwhelming majority of analysts in the fleet." She thought Kingsford understood intellectually that using Battle Fleet against modern ships of the wall was suicide (at least, unless you both had modern missile pods and were very, very careful), but he'd have trouble accepting emotionally that avoiding six of the wall with over a hundred of your own was in fact the smart move. In fact, she was fairly certain Kingsford wouldn't have ordered someone like Koh out to this part of the galaxy, which raised the question of how he'd gotten here. Though the man was a solid, if uninspired, fleet commander in her estimation, despite the many things about him she found disagreeable.

"You know the fleet will support you if you don't intend to go quietly."

"If I have no intention of setting myself up as a warlord – and I do not, here in Sanderson or anywhere else – then I need to have somewhere to call home if we can't go back to earth. If we're lucky, things will break there before they do here."

[break]

Replacing someone as talented as Zara Meyer weeks before a critical election was not something Kevin Diaz had appreciated. The grim-faced SLN Marine Intelligence officers who had explained to him that his chief of staff would be indefinitely detained had not made things any better. He had little liking for most League officials. But the emails exchanged in his name with Indira Thenuwara and an exchange with Audrey O'Harnahan where Zara seemed to be hinting that she would reveal a plot between Thenuwara and Diaz' party. And if that had happened, he would never be in the position he was now.

The final results had been tallied yesterday, and the SIP had won thirty-six percent of the vote for the Sol System Parliament's upper house, and five hundred sixteen of the two thousand and one members in the lower house. That made them the single largest party in the upper house, where voters chose on pure party preference. In the lower house, individual candidates faced each other, a new party who gained a majority of its votes from Sol system residents who did not live on Earth was at a disadvantage. In the Belt and on Luna, some of its candidates had been elected with absolute majorities. On Old Earth, only a handful of SIP candidates had squeaked by with a plurality; the old major parties were more firmly entrenched in most districts. The handful of exceptions were largely captive to single individuals or boutique parties; they were often able to swing control of Parliament, but could not this time.

"Relax, Johan." Diaz told the Alliance for Freedom's leader. "I told Quan earlier, and I'm telling you now, that I don't have any intention of setting up a bidding war for our party's services. I doubt any of us will have an outright majority – or even a plurality large enough to govern with just some of the small parties and independents as partners – any time soon." Certainly neither the Alliance nor One Sol had achieved an outright majority in decades; the SIP's emergence had taken some votes from the two established major parties, but mostly it had made its gains by reducing all other minor parties combined to a mere three percent of the vote for the upper house – below the threshold for representation even if all of those votes had been for the same party, and a fair number of its representatives in the lower house had been elected in other parties prior to yesterday's election.

"Thank you. If that's the case, I'll put all my cards on the table now. We'll agree to hold your referendum, you as Prime Minister, and your choice for Foreign Minister. Our choice for Treasury, and we control a majority of cabinet posts. And you know it will be easier to work with me than with Quan." He said. The Alliance was cozier with many of the trans-stellars than Diaz would have liked, but considering where much of the funding that had had bought his ascension had come from, he had little room to complain. And he was fairly certain that enough people who had supported other parties for one reason or another in the last election would still vote to leave the League. At least, they would right now, with ever-worse news coming in every day from the conflict with Manticore and their allies.

"That's probably true." There wasn't much to choose from between the old major parties, but the Alliance was probably, on balance, more amenable to compromise with his platform. "I don't want to drag out the secession referendum more than six weeks. Everyone has heard all the arguments on both sides already."

_Four Kings, Princedom of Sanderson_

Lt. Xing was not sure why their quarry had not left the planet. Passing through a spaceport might have increased his risk of detection, but if he could get beyond the hyper limit before the authorities discovered him he'd be free and clear. Perhaps he knew how wide-spread and effective the algorithms looking for him were. He'd certainly managed to avoid them until a few hours ago. She supposed everyone made a mistake eventually, but she was uneasy. Lt. Mendoza and Sharp Mind were showing it too. But even the 'cat had nothing definite to point his suspicion at.

"The camera that caught him is right…"

And she heard the crack of a pulser dart, and had barely noticed that the treecat had been the first target. A second dart struck Andrew Mendoza while Yuan was drawing her own. Neither she nor Mendoza were wearing armor. No one had gotten around to even designing armor for a treecat. She tried to find cover as she drew her own sidearm, but a third dart struck her much too quickly.

The shooter would have no choice but leave Sanderson now, but two Grand Alliance intelligence investigators and a Sphinxian treecat were far too dangerous to have on Sanderson. His superiors had other agents in-system. His opponents would have to go back Manticore to find another 'cat and investigator trained to work with one.


End file.
